A night Willis won’t forget

Once I started to ask the question to 49ers coach Mike Singletary on Tuesday after Patrick Willis’s news conference, he knew exactly what I was going to say and he started to chuckle. I was asking about a now infamous meeting during Willis’s rookie year, when Willis inadvertently took on his coaches.

During training camp that summer, defensive coordinator Greg Manusky had ducked into the linebackers room to ask if any players had questions about the overall scheme. Manusky wanted to know how his players were fitting in.

Willis took it as a chance to clear his mind.

“I don’t even know why you drafted me,” Willis answered. At that point veteran linebacker Hannibal Naives started tapping Willis’s chair with his foot. Naives was trying to get Willis to shut up, Willis thought Naives was encouraging him to keep going.

“I’m not a 3-4 linebacker,” Willis continued and he went on for a while. “I’m a 4-3 middle linebacker. Why am I even here?”

After Manusky left, Willis stayed in the linebackers room at the request of his position coach at the time, Singletary.

Once the rest of the linebackers left, Singletary lit into him. “Who are you to say anything! You’re a rookie! You’re nothing!” Singletary railed at him.

That night, Willis said he cried on the way home and then he quickly became the linebacker that was rewarded with a five-year extension, one that will pay him $29 million in guarantees and one that will jump his salary from $900,000 to $11 million this year.

“He grew up that night,” Singletary said, still smiling. “He learned a lot about himself, he learned a lot about me. He really grew up that night. That’s all I’ll say.”

That single night didn’t turn Willis into an All-Pro. But he did learn about the NFL, and he learned what it meant to play for Singletary, a man he continued to compliment during his news conference on Tuesday.

Of course all that is in Willis’s past, what’s in his future is much more intriguing. Singletary said Tuesday during the news conference that Willis still has a long way to go. In comparing him to Baltimore’s Ray Lewis, Singletary said, “He can do all the things Ray can do … Ray is going to do it one way. Pat is going to do it another way. He’s still working on his technique.”

A scary thought for Willis, who at one point thought he’d never make it as a Mike Singletary-coached linebacker.